'What Screens Want'

Frank Chimero wrote a sprawling, wonderful essay that reflects on the web as we know it, concluding that it has become too impersonal, cold, and calculating:

“We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.”

This is one of those pieces that I recommend reading on the web and not with Instapaper or Pocket. Frank created a special page just for this essay, and it's too pretty not to be enjoyed in its intended state.